West Coast port shutdown begins second week

LOS ANGELES -- A second week of a West Coast port shutdown will cause a noticeable increase in plant closings, job losses and financial market turmoil, say analysts and business leaders who are increasingly skeptical of a quick end to the labor dispute.

Already, storage facilities at beef, pork and poultry processing facilities across the country are full, crammed with produce that can't be exported.

Experts have estimated the shutdown could cost the U.S. economy $2 billion a day, and one report said a 20-day shutdown would cost $48.6 billion.

With nowhere to move their product, plant operators will begin shutting down Monday and layoffs will follow, said Mary Kay Thatcher, public policy director of the American Farm Bureau Federation.

In less than two weeks, if the shutdown continues, manufacturing plants will be grinding to a halt all over the country, farmers will be up in arms, and Asian equity and currency markets could face a full-blown crisis, said Steven Cohen, a University of California, Berkeley professor of regional planning.

"It's like draining a swamp. You start seeing all kinds of ugly creatures," he said.

Cohen, who studied the economic impact of the port closure for the shippers' association, said a five-day shutdown would cost the U.S. economy about $4.7 billion, while a 20-day shutdown would cost $48.6 billion.

Robert Parry, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said last week the stoppage could cost the economy $2 billion a day.

Talks between the Pacific Maritime Association, which represents shipping lines and terminal operators, and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union entered a fourth day Sunday.

Negotiators were meeting in separate rooms in a hotel in San Francisco's Chinatown, with a federal mediator shuttling between them.

"I think this will be a very long day, and a significant day," said PMA spokesman Steve Sugerman.

He said the PMA would keep pushing for an extension of the old contract, which specifically forbid the kind of work slowdowns the PMA said prompted the shutdown Sept. 29. The union has refused, holding out for a new three-year contract giving it control over jobs that come with new technology.

Implementing labor-saving technology like electronic tracking devices puts only a small number of jobs at risk in the short term, but future jobs are at stake, as well as control of the flow of information at the ports.